Hacked BigBoss, the biggest Cydia’s repository
The BigBoss app repository, the default package store for Cydia application, has been hacked by a group of hackers which named itself “Kim Jong-Cracks”.
The BigBoss repository, one of the biggest and most popular repositories for jailbreak tweaks in Cydia, has suffered a major
data breach.
Cydia is an application very popular within the community of iOS Apple users, it is the
jailbreaker’s App Store alternative for iOS. The unofficial store contains thousands of apps, themes, and many other downloads. Using Cydia
iOs users can find and install applications on their
jailbroken iOS Apple devices, the majority of the software in the store are available for free.
The BigBoss repository is the default repository for iOS devices jailbroken with Cydia, it is a privileged target for cybercriminals.
A group of hackers which name itself “Kim Jong-Cracks” gained the access to all packages present in the BigBoss repository and made them available through their own repository. As a proof to the hack, the groups made the deb index and BigBoss database available for download, which includes the log file reporting packages and their MD5.
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The other post more than likely broke rule 1 because it linked the site directly. To anyone that didn’t see the post the BigBoss repo was (supposedly) hacked by either an individual or group of people and they have a repo out there with all of BigBoss’s packages (paid and free). Their proof.log shows that they have the original MD5 sums,” the news of the hack was spread through
Reddit post.
The The hackers have made available all the applications on their website dubbed ripBigBoss, the site seems to include the entire collection of apps, nearly 13,954, available in BigBoss packages … all for free.
I’m not linking to the ripBigBoss website to avoid diffusion of malware that the manager could serve trough the site. At the time I was writing BitDefender AV is making it as infected website.
“The website and companion repo are using Saurik’s recent “Competition vs Community” as a motivation for their acts,” iDownloadBlog reports, but security experts are skeptical. I strongly suggest you to avoid the ripBigBoss repo, despite Kim Jong-Cracks announced that all the apps published are not infected. I remind you that it is quite easy for hackers to trojanize legitimate applications initially present in the BigBoss store.
To discourage Cydia users to refer BigBoss repository, Kim Jong-Cracks claims to have injected those free packages with malware. Jay Freeman, also known as as Saurik, the creator of Cydia, believes that the menaces of the group are not true. Saurik has augmented his thesis saying that he has verified that the content on BigBoss did not change from the analysis of the index of all historical changes to the repository.
“This article mentions malware being potentially injected into the BigBoss repository; we do not believe this to be the case, Saurik said in a statement to iDB. “Packages in Cydia repositories are cryptographically verified from the repository package index. I have an index of all historic changes to the package indices for default repositories, and have verified that the content on BigBoss did not change in ways that the repository administrators did not expect.”
Anyway, I strongly suggest you to avoid installing or updating any jailbreak tweak from the BigBoss repository in this phase neither from ripBigBoss repository.
Pierluigi Paganini
July 21, 2014
